Suchergebnisse

Cosmetic practices and colonial crucibles -- Modern girls and racial respectability -- Local manufacturing and color consciousness -- Beauty queens and consumer capitalism -- Active ingredients and growing criticism -- Black consciousness and biomedical opposition.

Imperial populations and women's affairs -- Colonial uplift and girl-midwives -- Mau Mau and the girls who circumcised themselves -- Late colonial customs and wayward schoolgirls -- Postcolonial nationalism and modern single mothers

Why has 'agency' been such a tenacious concept in historical scholarship on women and gender, and what have been the consequences on this tenacity? This essay tackles these questions and proposes, through a brief examination of the history of skin lighteners in South Africa and beyond, how agency might be pushed in more surprising, more analytically productive directions. Too often agency slips from being a conceptual tool or starting point to a concluding argument. For example, in my subfield of African women's and gender history, statements like 'African women had agency' can stand as the impoverished punch lines of empirically rich studies. Consideration of Walter Johnson's 2003 essay 'On Agency' highlights the intellectual and political imperatives of 1970s Marxist and feminist social history that placed agency at centre stage. This essay examines why, more than a decade after Johnson's critique, agency endures as a 'safety' argument for reasons related to representational politics, research methodologies and the circumscribed imagination of intellectual gatekeepers. It argues that we should move beyond agency as argument by attending to the multiple concerns and desires – some intentional, others not – that animate human actions, including contentious gendered practices, and by examining how different historical actors have themselves understood agency. Agency has a history. By acknowledging and tracing that history, we will be better able to discern the usefulness and limits of agency for our own analyses.

This article examines reproductive struggles and debates in late colonial and early postcolonial Kenya by reconstructing the history of the short-lived Affiliation Act, a law that granted all single women the right to sue the fathers of their children for paternity support. In 1959, the colonial government enacted this racially inclusive law in a bid to address the social problem of "illegitimacy" through familial channels, and to demonstrate the government's commitment to a nonracial future. The passage of the Affiliation Act, and women's subsequent use of it generated intense debates over the relative powers of men and women, and the value of the "modern" and "traditional" in postcolonial Kenya. Through denouncing and engaging the Affiliation Act, Kenyans argued over who should control women's sexuality, and who should bear the responsibility for, and reap the rewards of, their fertility. They also contested the vision of gender relations that should be embodied in African nationalism and should be promoted by the new Kenyan nation. This article demonstrates how material struggles stemming from pregnancy and surrounding child rearing—"the politics of the womb"—have been important to the elaboration of gender and political relations in postcolonial Africa.

Those of the iron‐wedge knife (ciorunya), stay at the side, you.Do not abuse those of the razor blade (ciokaembe), you.A circumcised girl without water on the stomach when guarded by the Government.A circumcised girl without water on the stomach when guarded by the Government.1